Ready, Set, Learn!

Whatever you do, work heartily as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ. ~Col. 3:23-24 

I realized today that I've blogged a lot about life, and not much about the joy of teaching twenty fifth graders!  I will remedy that today.  The Lord's love for these students energizes me every morning before they even walk through the door.  What a blessing, but also what a responsibility!  Overall, this class is extremely sociable, kind, and creative.  Below are some photos to capture things we have been learning at Highlands.

We are fortunate enough to have "Reading Buddies" with the second grade class at our school.  Every Friday, we meet to read together and do some literacy activities.  This is a great opportunity for my fifth graders to mentor others and practice their reading skills.  

On this particular day, my fifth graders wrote a creative narrative about their own imaginary animal using as many spelling words as they could!  The second graders' challenge was to listen to the story and try to illustrate the animal.  The better the fifth graders' descriptions, the more accurate and detailed the drawings.  It was a fun way to incorporate literacy and art!

In our last Social Studies unit, fifth grade learned about the early colonial settlers in North America from Spain, France, and Britain.  As a culmination to our unit, the students were challenged to represent one region of North American colonization with a poster and presentation.  Each poster was a 'piece of the puzzle' to our large North America map.  The cooperative groups had a week to illustrate their map and present a summary of their colonists.  What I love about this fifth grade class is that their first question was, "Miss Shipman, can we make the presentation a skit? With costumes and props?"

British New England Colonies

 Diverse Middle Colonies

Sweet Southern Colonies 

Colonies of New Spain 

 Colonies of New France

LOVED this illustration of Marquette & Joliet exploring the Mississippi River! 

Our collective map - What a beautiful addition to our classroom, and a great way to represent everything we learned about the early colonial settlers!

Last, but not least, please enjoy this journal entry from a student.  Their journal prompt that morning was, "My dream job..."